Abstract
Color constancy is a color vision ability, with which we can perceive colors of surfaces under different illuminants as constant. To accomplish color constancy the illuminant color needs to be discounted from the light reflected from surfaces. Some strategies for discounting the illuminant color use statistics of luminance and chromaticity distribution in natural scenes. Gray-World hypothesis is a typical framework of this sort of strategies. Golz and MacLeod (2002) showed that the luminance-chromaticity correlation of surfaces was a strong cue for estimating the illuminant color. In this paper I introduced the luminance balance hypothesis, a novel hypothesis, which is based on estimation of illuminants using the luminance distribution of the optimal colors.
